Retrospectives on Jimmy Carter often say that his presidency began circling the drain when he gave the "malaise" speech. (Some acknowledge that he did not actually use that word).
The most fascinating aspect of that speech is not so much the problems he was addressing or the solutions he proposed, but just how contemporary it sounds.
This is what Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.
Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
Change a few particulars, and it might be something any politician -- or any commenter on social media -- might say.
Right now the refrain was that the COVID pandemic, the lock downs, and the 2020 riots destroyed trust in our institutions.
Before that, people lamented that George Bush lying us into the war in Iraq and the bailout of financial institutions destroyed our trust in the system.
And in 1979, Jimmy Carter was saying we lost trust in our institutions due to the 1960's assassinations, the Vietnam war, the Watergate scandal, inflation, and the oil embargo.
And lest one think that at least there was trust in our institutions before that, don't forget that an earlier generation had to deal with the corruption of the Harding Administration, the Great Depression, and World War II.
And before that someone was proposing that the nation actually lost its innocence in 1919 when the World Series was rigged.
It's almost as if there have always been problems.
I am old enough to have a teenage memory of Jimmy Carter's speech. And, young as I was, it seemed to me even then that maybe living in an illusion -- falsely thinking that our armies were invincible, our leaders incorruptible, and our resources limitless -- was not sustainable, and that facing unwelcome realities was simply a fact of life.
An unwelcome but inevitable part of growing up for every child is learning that one's parents are not perfect. And an unwelcome but inevitable part of reaching political adulthood is learning that our institutions are not perfect either, and that our society has problems.
But true maturity lies in understanding that no parents are perfect, that no institutions are perfect, and that every society has always had problems and always will.
How much of the true underlying cause of so many of our political problems is that all too many people have not reached that state of civic adulthood?
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